The highly educated have a better chance of surviving cancer

Patients with high education have a better chance of surviving cancer, according to research published by Jon H. Fiva, Torbjørn Hægeland, Marte Rønning and Astri Syse. The reason being that they use specialized treatment to a greater extent than less educated patients.

Illustration: differences across educational disciplines in patients with higher education.

More likely to be transferred

Among cancer patients residing outside of the Oslo region, highly educated people are more likely than other patients to be transferred to the specialized hospitals at the national level. Since these hospitals are more likely to offer more advanced treatment, such transfers increase the probability of survival.

Socioeconomic inequalities

It is not surprising that a fully privatized health care system can produce social inequalities. Treatment quality is expected to depend on income when health services must be bought in the open marked. This is less obvious in an egalitarian welfare state such as Norway, where the public health care system aims to offer equal access to high quality health care regardless of socioeconomic status and geographical location. Educational inequalities in cancer mortality are actually of a similar magnitude in the United States and in the Nordic countries.

Substantial educational inequalities in cancer survival have been documented by previous research. The recently published paper by Fiva, Hægeland, Rønning and Syse shows a link between these educational differences and differential access to and utilization of high quality treatment options.

The researchers

Jon H. Fiva is an associate professor at the Norwegian Business School and researcher at ESOP, and his co-authors work at Statistics Norway (SSB).

Published Aug. 28, 2014 1:54 PM - Last modified Sep. 27, 2018 5:10 PM